


More than a Bird, More than a Plane

by Indybaggins



Category: Whose Line Is It Anyway? RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe, Friendship, Humor, M/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-12
Updated: 2011-09-12
Packaged: 2018-01-10 03:37:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1154343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Indybaggins/pseuds/Indybaggins
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU. Colin has never rescued anyone.</p><p>Yet he slips into superhero identities like well-fitted gloves.</p>
            </blockquote>





	More than a Bird, More than a Plane

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: “The characters are superheroes dealing with petty problems.” Warnings: Small scene which describes child abuse and violence. References to mental illness. Besides that, surprisingly sweet (for me). All the super hero identities used here have actually been played by the person I’ve given them to during either UK or US Whose Line.

 

  


Colin is ten. He is obsessed with superheroes, and even though he knows they aren’t real (like Santa, like almost everything he sees on TV besides the news, like his father saying “I wouldn’t hit you if only you would behave.”), he badly wants them to be. He imagines he’s as quick as Superman when he runs away from the bullies at school. He is no longer scared in the dark, because Batman isn’t either. He knows he’s as strong as Iron Man when his father uses his belt again and he doesn’t even flinch. 

That glorious Christmas the house is quiet and his mother smiles and his father gives him a heavy metal Batman lunchbox, and he is the happiest he has ever been. That night Colin nicknames himself “Lunchbox Boy” and goes to sleep with a smile on his face and the box in his arms. It lasts for three days, three days of perfect joy; until his brother takes the lunchbox from him and bangs it and he screams (he had forgotten, just for a moment, that he wasn’t supposed to make any noise. He just had been so angry.) and his mother had swooped in like a saving angel, her pink bathrobe fluttering around her, protecting them. His father, drunk and enraged, pulled the box from her hands and hit her with it until her face was a bloody pulp. 

The next day Colin is in foster care, and renames himself “Captain Coward”. 

 

He has to grow up fast and maybe that’s why he holds on to the childish fantasy of heroes, often orphans, often mistreated, triumphing in the end. By age seventeen he is realistic enough to know that he will never actually be anything special, but that doesn’t mean he can’t use it. He slips into superhero identities like well-fitted gloves. He becomes “Disco Boy” when they go out dancing, sultry with his hips and sure of every movement. “Captain Ballerina” whenever someone accuses him of being queer (and whether he is or not, he can’t even tell). But those are only temporary, at the core he is still himself, a coward, a nothing, no one. 

He adapts well like that, he survives, until at age twenty-two he becomes “Boneless Boy” and genuinely believes he can’t walk anymore so he doesn’t leave his bed for weeks. Then, sarcastically, “Captain Bloodloss” after he tries to cut his wrists. He spends six months in a state-funded institution, and the shrinks whisper about “dissociative identity disorder” and “childhood trauma”. He doesn’t care. 

When they release him he becomes “The Bitter Drunk Kid” for a while and then “Pants Around The Ankles Boy” when he lets himself be fucked in the back of seedy bars and motel rooms for hours at a time. Those are a good couple years. Eventually he simultaneously sobers and wizens up and graduates himself to “Professor Panic” because that sounds as if he knows what he is talking about. 

 

At thirty-five, Colin is renting an old, run-down apartment and has been working at an entry-level job in a call center for four years. He schedules his breaks around everyone else’s, so that he never has to talk to anyone besides the clients, and those are easy, he has a script. He has never rescued anyone. 

He is so used to the lines he has to say, the part he has to play, that at first he doesn’t even respond when his next victim answers the phone with “Hello, Proctologist Man speaking”. He only laughs when, after he has introduced himself, the man says “Oh fuck, sorry, I thought you were one of those debt collectors” and then, after a pause, “For you I’ll be Beautiful Martini Man then.” Colin snorts, and they start talking. Or mainly, the man talks and Colin listens. He explains how he can’t buy anything because he’s out of money and his house is about to be foreclosed. How his name is Greg and he’d been laid off a year ago. How his house is lonely and empty without furniture, but luckily he still has his cat (that Colin hears meowing in the background). Oh and that his landline is going to be cut off really soon but that then he plans on spending his days in a neighborhood coffee shop. The whole thing is so strange that Colin can still hear the man’s voice long after he has put down the phone, and, for no reason he can name, calls him back the next day to see if the line is disconnected yet. Greg seems happy to hear him, fills up the awkward pause after Colin says hello with excited chatter and calls back three times that day to complain that he is bored. Colin doesn’t mind. After a while he even takes to smiling as soon as he sees the number pop up on his pc screen.

In the next couple weeks Greg gets evicted, and Colin gets a notice at work for spending too much time on one client. In his head, he starts referring to Greg as “Imaginary Friend Boy” because he has seen Fight Club and he knows that these things are never real. When that evening while grocery shopping he throws a can of cat food in with his regular purchases, he chalks it up to insanity. But two days later Colin gives Greg his address and tells him to come over, and somehow, impossibly, Greg does. He ends up being a man with large glasses and a wrinkled, but stylish suit, in one hand carrying a suitcase and in the other a loudly meowing container. Colin lets him in and hands him a spare key. That’s all the love he is willing to give and Greg accepts it. 

 

It’s awkward, that first evening, Greg’s eyes linger on Colin’s scarred wrists, and Colin doesn’t know what to say. When he goes to work in the morning and leaves a snoring Greg behind he feels anxious. He spends all day wondering whether Greg has sold all his furniture by now, and trying to rescue someone is stupid. When he comes home at night it turns out the cat has shed all over the sofa, Greg has fashioned a litter box from a laundry basket and is cooking dinner. It smells delicious. Greg jokes that he is “Not Hot, But Spicy Man” and Colin surprises himself by thinking that he is wrong on the “not hot” part. 

On Tuesday Greg reorganizes his shelves, and Greg’s cat (“Allison”, don’t ask why) comes to sleep in Colin’s bed, loudly purring. By Friday Greg joins them. And it’s easy, really, sex has always been easy (Greg teasingly whispers “Kama Sutra Boy,” into Colin’s ear, and he feels ridiculously pleased.) but it’s the mornings and evenings and weekends that end up amazing him. Greg is wonderful. He asks for a budget and cooks from scratch every day. He cleans the apartment methodically, and when that is done starts fixing the shower drain, the cabinets, the creaking floor. When he starts painting he does it so sneakily that it takes Colin two days to notice that his drab apartment is slowly turning into fresh and rich colors, as if the sun has just come up. 

Greg has downsides too, of course. He insists that Colin eats fresh and healthy, and when he doesn’t frets with a tendency bordering on obsessive. Colin laughs and calls him “Fruit and Vegetable Man” so see him blush and mumble something about not understanding the needs of a body. He can get extreme about cleaning as well. Colin is too kind to call him “Obsessive-Compulsive Man” but he often thinks it when Greg has to clean his kitchen just one more time before going to sleep. He always smells of chemical perfumes and scrubs the skin of his hands with dishwashing soap and a brush until it peels. Colin guesses it has to do with control and he understands that, a little. The only side of dirtiness that doesn’t seem to bother Greg is Allison, the cat, who has horrible breath, sheds in clumps and follows Colin into the bathroom to watch him pee every morning. Colin compromises by showering before and after every time they have sex, gains ten pounds from all the food and gets to know the sound of his own laugh again. So in all it doesn’t faze him when one day he thinks about it and comes to the conclusion that this is happiness, pretty much.

 

Colin doesn’t make enough to support them both, especially not with Greg’s fresh produce obsession, so Greg tries even harder to get a job, and eventually succeeds in finding one (through endless mocking, nagging and persistence) as a barista in his favorite coffee shop. He has to trade in his suits for the company uniform and comes home all jittery from the free caffeine, but he seems to be pleased with it none the less. He has to cut through a park to walk there, so when Greg comes home one day an hour late, dirty and bruised and trailing with him a man with a bleeding nose, Colin thinks he has finally lost it and has started inviting the homeless back to their place. 

Which turns out to be right. The man is tall and besides bleeding, horribly dirty. His jeans are ripped, and sweatshirt faded. His muddy toes are poking through his sneakers. Colin is surprised Greg even dared to touch this guy, and makes it a point to offer his hand. The man takes it, and introduces himself shyly as Ryan, (“More like Touchy Feely man!” Greg grumbles). Apparently they got into a fight in the park. Over a kitten. More importantly, over who got to climb the tree to save the kitten. And by the time they had finished beating each other up the kitten was gone. (Colin can’t help but find this somewhat funny, but is careful not to laugh.) 

“I really would have liked a kitten,” Ryan says. 

“Me too,” Greg agrees. 

They both look sad. Colin has to bite his lip not to smile. 

Ryan explains that he actually lives in the park, ever since he lost his job as a comedian in a strip club (“They called me Bad John Wayne Impression Man,” he sighs). That he has done some drug dealing, but that he is not very good at it. And that he once had an act that included channeling the spirits of farm animals (Greg falls off his chair laughing). 

They let him clean up and sleep on the sofa because it’s the right thing to do, and Colin catches Greg smiling wistfully when he gets to cook for three that night. They don’t even have to argue about it, Ryan gets invited to stay around for a while, and Colin doesn’t even feel apprehensive about the future of his furniture anymore, just grateful when he gets to hold Greg at night and see Ryan grin over breakfast.

 

A month later Ryan has a key of his own, and Greg and him bring home a puffy grey kitten from the animal shelter (a different one than the one in the tree, obviously, but still cute). Colin just rolls his eyes and gets in for a closer look at the pitiful little thing, but then Allison takes notice and, for the first time ever- growls. The kitten hisses back and scratches Greg’s arms until he is forced to let it go. It lands with a thud, scatters under the furniture, then climbs the curtains, gets stuck in the curtains, and when Ryan carefully walks up to untangle it, bites him. When Colin gets involved it pushes its nails into Colin’s shirt and climbs all over him, and then jumps off and hides under the sofa where Allison finds it, and starts chasing it round the room with murderous intention. 

Ten minutes later they are locked in the bathroom, bloody cuts on all three of them, while in the living room kitten world war three continues to take place. Greg takes out the antiseptic and Band-Aids and Colin shrugs out of his shirt, little dots of blood appearing all over his chest. They are all panting.  
“It seemed so innocent in the shelter,” Greg says, while spraying Colin with the antiseptic. It’s cold, and little streams of it roll down to Colin’s stomach before Greg carefully pats him dry. 

“They always do,” Colin says darkly. 

Ryan’s eyes widen at that. He seems red. Also, he is licking his lips. While staring at Colin’s chest. Colin feels his own cheeks flush because he knows that look and, _wow_. 

Greg straightens up, and looks at Ryan, “What are you, Totally Worships Colin Man?” 

“No, given the setting I think I’ll go with Seductive Shower Boy”. Ryan sounds as if he is on autopilot, possibly a little frantic. He steps back towards the door. In the living room they can hear glass breaking. 

Colin wants to intervene because he is afraid they are going to fight now, any second, when Greg steps way too close into Ryan’s personal space and moves and… presses his mouth to Ryan’s. Ryan looks at Colin, shocked, and then hesitantly closes his eyes and returns the kiss. Colin lets out a breath he didn’t know he was holding.

They don’t kiss for long, it’s more of a statement than anything else, Colin thinks, he should have known that Greg would have wanted to get there first. When they’re done, they step apart and both look at Colin. And Colin realizes he isn’t afraid for this. Never again. So he steps in between them and takes his turn, stands on his tip-toes and kisses Ryan on the mouth, soft and wet. He can hear Greg laugh somewhere behind him, and then, as it goes on, start kissing his neck. He groans. 

Clothes get taken off and they writhe together in the too-small room, cleaning products falling over and rolls of toilet paper hitting Colin on the head. And Greg insists on the shower so they press into it, all three of them, warm and laughing and intense and there isn’t even room enough for any kind of decent sex, just touching and rubbing and letting the water swirl away their sweat and come. 

By the time they come out of the steamed-up bathroom Allison is licking the new kitten, and Colin feels like he can do anything.

For real, now.

 

 

 

 


End file.
